BUY
The Seamstress by Maria Duenas
Review by Kirsty Hooper http://booksonspain.wordpress.com/
Madrid, 1936. The young seamstress Sira Quiroga ekes out a living with her single mother. Poor and frustrated, her only chance of escape is to pass the civil service exams and become a typist. When Ramiro, a dashing typewriter salesman, erupts into her life with promises of wealth and luxury in Buenos Aires, Sira scandalises everyone by abandoning her respectable fiancé and moving in with him. Then her long-lost father, a wealthy married businessman, makes contact and hands her an inheritance, and it is too much for Ramiro to resist. He persuades Sira to leave Madrid and her mother for the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco, and in March 1936 they set sail for Tangiers, where Sira’s life, set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and the European conflict that followed, takes an unexpected turn.
The Seamstress is the new English translation by Daniel Hahn of María Dueñas’s blockbuster 2009 novel El tiempo entre costuras (literally: The Time Between Seams). And what a blockbuster it is! Since its publication in June 2009, it has barely been out of the bestseller lists – more than two years later, in September 2011, it was still at no. 4 in the fiction ‘top ten’ published by ¿Qué Leer? And, as I write this review in February 2012, Spanish audiences are eagerly awaiting the forthcoming Antena Tres TV series, starring Adriana Ugarte, Tristán Ulloa, and Raúl Arévalo.
The Seamstress is an enthralling example of the current boom in Spanish historical novels that walk the delicate line between fiction, memory and national history. Since the start of the new millennium, as Spaniards strive to come to terms with the repercussions of their country’s turbulent 20th century, they have increasingly turned to novelists such as Dulce Chacón (La voz dormida, 2002; translated as The Sleeping Voice), Julia Navarro (Dime quien soy, 2009) and Almudena Grandes (Corazón helado, 2007; Inés y la alegría, 2010). Usually told from the perspective of a single individual or family, these novels have torn open the Pandora’s box of collective memory, which had been firmly shut in 1978 by the pacto del olvido (pact of forgetting) that underpinned Spain’s post-Franco transition to democracy.
Dueñas’s negotiation of this delicate line is informed by her professional background as a Professor of English at the University of Murcia. Like Chacón, who drew on interviews carried out with surviving Republican ex-prisoners, Dueñas has gone back to the source in her desire to recreate the fabric of daily life in Spanish Morocco during the war-torn 1930s. Much of the novel takes place in Tetouan where, as Sira navigates her way around the shifting alliances of the city’s seedy expatriate community, she comes into contact with influential real-life figures such as the Francoist minister Juan Luis Beigbeder and the British intelligence agents Rosalind Powell Fox and Alan Hillgarth. In researching this wide-ranging background, Dueñas made use of a substantial scholarly bibliography (which appears at the end of the novel), but she also worked with the La Medina Association of former residents of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco and the Tetouan-Asmir Association that works for the city’s current development, as well as drawing on the ‘Moroccan recollections’ unearthed by her own mother and aunts. The result is a vivid depiction of a city whose name may be familiar to us from Madrid’s Tetuán metro station, but about which I, certainly, knew almost nothing more.
Overall, this is a gripping novel with a compelling narrative, which brings a forgotten aspect of Spanish – and British – history to life. Sira is an engaging heroine who makes some horrible mistakes and – as we’ll see in the TV series – some fabulous dresses. Recommended!
Kirsty Hooper is a specialist in Spanish and Galician Studies she specialises above all in the culture and literature of Galicia, but is now branching out to work on the Basque Country and the Canary Islands too. She’s especially interested in Anglophone communities in Spain and Hispanic communities in the UK, and her ‘Hispanic Liverpool’ project (http://www.kirstyhooper.net/home-page/hispanic-liverpool/) has traced some 2000 Liverpudlians of Hispanic origin. In 2012 she moved from Liverpool University to set up the Hispanic Studies Department at Warwick University.
Books4Spain is the No 1 online bookshop for ebooks and books about Spain, ranging from subjects such Flamenco, the Spanish Civil War, Camino de Santiago as well as Spanish Literature in translation, Crime Fiction books set in Spain, books about Living in Spain, Novels set in Spain, Spanish Cook & Recipe books and much more as well as books about Spanish authors and artists such as Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dali, Picasso, Franco, Bunuel etc.
I most certainly have to read this book, particularly given this expert review by Kirsty Hooper. I confess its “blockbuster” status had me thinking it might be of the ilk of “Fifty Shades of Grey” or some such nonsense. I´ve been to Tetouan – not the metro station – and learned something of the Spanish Protectorate from the fantastic, dedicated and long-suffering Spanish staff of the Instituto Cervantes there who treated me – the wife of another Cervantes employee – like royalty, even getting me quickly across the border from Ceuta or I´d be there still. What struck me was how fundamentalist (Islamic) the city was as well as the warmth and kindness of my guides, Moroccan employees of the Cervantes, who took me all over the city and showed me its Jewish Quarter, its Mellah and even their own Arab Living Room. I was given gifts, helped to buy Arab clothing (much to the hilarity of all, as I wasn´t sure at all about suiting it with my short hair and said so vociferously)and all my questions were answered – women, monarchy, fundamentalism, etc. What was difficult was the business of eating out – I could, but the kitchen staff came out to see this woman eating alone, and I had to invent a husband so caught up in meetings that he couldn´t accompany me to lunch. Yet I took away an impression of polite, helpful people who melted if you smiled … and used Spanish! I´ll never forget Teouan, and am off to read this book.
I usually like to read books set in the UK pre-WWII, generally the type where it is the working class contra middle/upper classes. However, one day when searching for a new book in my local supermarket, the cover of The Seamstress caught my eye. And I am so pleased it did. I never thought I would be captivated by espionage; at times I couldn’t put the book down.